struggled desperately to deceive
herself she has never been able to deceive me. You are a strong,
attractive man. The glamour of mystery rests upon you. You have done
prodigious deeds here, Mr. Percival. All of this I recognize, and I
should be unfair to my own sense of honour were I to deny you my respect
and gratitude. I must be fair. Fear has been the cause of my attitude
toward you,--not fear of you, sir, but fear for my niece. Now I am
confronted by the inevitable. The thing I have tried so hard to avoid
has come to pass. In these circumstances, I am forced to confess that
I have not been without a real, true admiration for you. I admit that
I have felt a great security with you in command of our camp. But, even
so, you are not the man I would have chosen to be Ruth's husband. The
time is surely coming when we will be delivered from this island prison,
when we will return to the life and the people and the conditions we
knew before catastrophe made a new world for us. I am thinking of that
time, Mr. Percival, and not of the present. I fear my niece is thinking
only of the present and not of the future."

He had listened with grave deference. "Forgive me if I appear
impertinent, Mrs. Spofford, but is it not, after all, the past you are
thinking about?"

She did not answer at once. His question had startled her.

"Youth does not live in the past," he went on quietly. "It deals only
with the present. I love Ruth Clinton,--I love her with the cleanest
love a man can feel for a woman. It will not alter when we leave this
island. If we are fated to spend the rest of our lives here, it will
endure to the end."

"You are speaking for yourself," she said. "Can you speak for Ruth?"

"No, I cannot," he admitted. "Nor can you," he added boldly. "That is
what I meant when I asked if you were not thinking chiefly of the past.
I cannot say that Ruth will love me always, but I can say this: she
loves me now, as I love her, and in her heart she has said just what I
said to you a moment ago,--that her love will endure."

"I daresay I do think more of the past than of the present, Mr.
Percival. You are right about the future. It is a blank page, to be
glorified or soiled by what is set down upon it. Fate has thrown you
two together. Perhaps it was so written in the past that you despise.
A single turn of the mysterious wheel of fortune brought you into her
life. Half a turn,--the matter of minutes,--and you would never have
se